Finds: January 16, 2014

Amaury Lovin, "Blood and Spirit: Reading beyond Orwell for a glimpse of British Burma" at Myanmar Times:

http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/9171-blood-and-spirit-reading-beyond-orwell-for-a-glimpse-of-british-burma.html

Things have loosened up in Myanmar/Burma; a few years ago, this piece probably could not have been published. It's a look at the British writer Maurice Collis (1889-1973), who lived in Burma over a twenty-year period, and wrote many books, both fiction and non-fiction, about that country and other subjects.

A few years back I read George Orwell's terribly sad novel Burmese Days, which reflects his time posted in the colony, and followed up with the pseudonymous Emma Larkin's excellent Finding George Orwell in Burma, where Collis shows up in the bibliography. It sounds as if Collis had some of the same issues with the the British colonial administration as Orwell had.

It would be interesting to read some of Collis's output. There is not much in print, and nothing is available in ebook formats (at least not that I have been able to find). This points up one of the limitations of ebooks, that if a work is not yet in the public domain (it's post-1920s, in other words), but is also of limited current commercial interest, the chances of it showing up as an ebook are at the moment rather slim. That situation might improve over time. But I think I'll always be going to second-hand dealers for hard copies of titles that are somewhere in this chasm of lost books (it's much more than a "crack"). This is not completely a hardship, since even though I am very happy with my e-reader (an iPad), I'll never abandon my romance with physical books.